Not just so that you don't lose it in case of an invasion, but it is proof that you would be willing to help out the host country in the case they were invaded. Also, that you would not invade them.
In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.
The United States and Canada must have enjoyed that feeling of safety, knowing that the Netherlands would not invade them. And of course, if someone were to invade the United States (or Canada), knowing that the mighty Netherlands would come to their help would be immensely reassuring.
Interestingly, 59 tonnes of gold was sold in USA and bought in London. So that means perhaps "Somebody" transferred 59 tonnes of their gold holdings to the USA.. who was that?
This is similar to what the French did last year.
The other thing I noticed, is that as the article chose to mention:
> Gold that is held with the Bank of England must meet modern international trade standards
with implication being that the gold it previously held in the USA was not meeting those standards, but is that just journalistic fluff? what are those standards? (could be exact weights in g rather than purity?)
NB the Netherlands still has >200 tonnes of gold held in the USA & Canada.
The standards of purity have changed over time, and most of the US gold dates from before the 1930s; and so a lot of US-domiciled gold have different purities that don't follow the current international standard. The purity requirement has been going up over time. A lot of US gold is 90% gold and 10% copper, but gold traded on the international market needs to be at least 99.5% pure. Here [1] is a good breakdown.
When you buy gold, you purchase based on the amount of gold, not the total amount of alloy. This is true in both markets. This difference in standard is practically not a big deal because you very rarely physically move the gold, as moving gold requires a lot of security and is a risk.
Physical gold bars are transferred via plane between London and New York every day. The gold flies in the cargo holds of regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights. The quantity transferred depends on demand, and could be several metric tons daily.
This is nothing unusual. Dubai is another major gold transfer hub, and it operates via the same mechanism.
Regarding the article highlighting differing international standards for gold, London uses standard 400-ounce bars, while the US uses 100-ounce or 1kg bars. Often, the bars need to be remelted (elsewhere, typically in Switzerland) before they can be added to the vaults.
Is gold really sufficiently fungible to enable daily bidirectional sizable flows across the Atlantic, but not fungible enough to allow somebody to net these flows out and save at least one way of the airfare?
That is the spread which the gold dealers have to make a profit. But bullion is bullion anywhere you turn and no matter to who you sell. No gold dealer will turn down investment grade gold.
Never have a gold dealer anywhere asked me for any laboratory fee when selling bullion to them. They have their spread and that's it. It's their job to recognize bullion and have their own laboratory to quickly check if needed.
Coordination cost maybe. If you're transferring A -> B and C <- D, but A and C or B and D don't know each other or even dislike each other, it's going to be hard to even get them to talk about the fungibility of the actual bars. And I bet airfare is the cheapest part after all the security and paychecks of people arranging the transaction.
Most of this is googleable but there are thousands of traders that make sure the gold price is the same globally so nobody had to “move” their gold in the reverse for this trade to work.
The difference between London and the US is that the bars are of different size (12.5 vs 1kg).
> there are thousands of traders that make sure the gold price is the same globally so nobody had to “move” their gold
Physical versus contract differences are real and require moving the actual gold. What most users do is sell deliverable where they want it out and then buy contracts or deliverable where they want it and then let the market figure out how to move gold around to settle. (It probably won’t involve moving gold from where you had it to where you want it unless you’re in a cohort.)
The price of gold is not equal globally, there is a ‘loco swap’ price differential, reflecting the price of moving the metal, eg flights, security, tariffs that may be attracted, whether the location can service futures delivery etc
> Interestingly, 59 tonnes of gold was sold in USA and bought in London. So that means perhaps "Somebody" transferred 59 tonnes of their gold holdings to the USA.. who was that?
That 59T could have been someone that decided to starting owning gold for the very first time, so 'net-new' holding rather than a 'transfer'. The 59T could have also been multiple parties and not an individual "somebody": we only know that it was 59T from the sell side (NL).
California alone grows about half of the US's nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Both the West Coast and rest of the country could reconfigure production to serve themselves if desired.
We can do more than hope: Move the wall from the southern border to the eastern border (and probably embargo whatever oil rigs and space launch platforms are planned for places like Monterey Bay)
That way, we can get to keep our beaches, and continue to hire migrant labor from the rest of America to help during harvest season.
the age is not the measure of quality. the GP said they left the posts/comments open. anybody can read that and check if they are or not a serious contributor
interesting interpretation. most other articles on the topic have a different interpretation. if the AI can not be the author, then who can? is writing the prompt enough to establish being the creator? i think we need a few more cases to get an answer to that.
Obviously, taking a photo requires much more than clicking a button. Even if you simply pointed and shot, the timing can be special. Copyright requires some creativity, if the creation process is completely mechanical you may not be able to copyright the end result.
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test. In fact it calls it an illusion.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
In a sense I agree with you that this is the intent of the article. I find this kind of laughable because I do not consider myself to have aphantasia (I can visualize things just fine) but the afterimage test is not even vaguely representative of how I visualize things.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
I think the poll itself is faulty. You appear to be suggesting that the two things - seeing an afterimage and being able to consciously superimpose an imagined image into your visual field are related. An afterimage is literally a physical phenomenon as I explained before, and it passes quickly. There is an explanation of this, in an article that somebody posted a link to the other day in the discussion about Olo. https://dynomight.net/colors/
> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it
This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.
I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.
I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.
In my opinion, as someone who does *not* think that they have aphantasia, the two things are definitely not equivalent. I know what the afterimage is, I know what it is to visualize something, and they are completely different both qualitatively and intellectually.
But as I keep saying, there are people on this thread that are saying they are literally equivalent. I don't know if I believe them, but that is what they are saying -- talk to them!
I found that some of the timeline seemed out for my worldview. I'm not really sure how long the whole AI bubble has been out there, but it just seems so recent that I wasn't sure how they fitted all that in in the current timeline. Perhaps that will mature, in 5 years it won't all seem so new and perhaps more plausible.
To address the GPs point though, I do think that with LLM-assistance even now you can certainly create such sites pretty quickly with a low skill level, and that will only become easier. The big problem with creating things (in that way, or manually) is that you are the architect and artistic director, and in truth many people just don't have the ability to manage the end-result in a way that will work. We see this in websites created by developers for their own software which get posted here. Too many times there are massive assumptions that the viewer knows all about the software, which means it is almost incomprehensible to the incomer who may be interested but leaves before engaging (that is: me). I don't suppose that was a problem for Aarons bot society, but it could have affected the launch.
I recognise these scammers. I run a website for a small community group which just has a bit of information about them which has a contact us page with minimal protection. It comes in waves the language is very similar offering SEO and suchlike. I don't allow any of that through to the community because they are mostly non-technical and somebody will no doubt reply.
This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.
As to why, Gary didn't say.. or even contribute again, so we could surmise it was a made-up name to make sure the company he worked for wasn't identified, but some of the replies to his mail went into more detail about why they did, you can find them here
Keepass database is an openly documented format, and there are several apps available on iOS that use it and can store the database in your iCloud (ie syncthing is not required, unless you need to sync to non-iOS devices)
Just search for keepass in the app store (Keepassium, KeePass Touch, Strongbox, ...)
Trebuchet were used primarily to hammer the walls of the castle to break them down. Not really possible to aim at a person; the soldiers clambering over the broken walls will do that.
In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.
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